The thoughts I lose are never the clean ones.
They arrive as one sentence with two things jammed inside. A question about usage-based pricing I want to keep chewing on, and the small job I have to do about it this week. One sentence, two different kinds of thing.
Keep and Apple Notes made me pick before I could type. Task list, or note. Pick the container first, then write.
That is a decision at the worst moment. The thought is still forming and I am standing somewhere with a phone. So I picked wrong, or more often I picked neither, and the thought was gone by evening. Over a couple of years that is a lot of thinking I did twice.
I thought the fix was better categories.
It was not. Better categories still leave the deciding to me, and the deciding is the part I am bad at.
So the sorter does not ask.
Capture takes the sentence the way it arrived. The sorter reads it, works out what kinds of thing are inside, and puts each one where it goes. In the demo that takes fourteen seconds. The board comes back with an action and a thread named Usage-based pricing vs seats. The header reads Actions 1 · Threads 1. I did not tag anything or choose a list.
The split matters more than it looks. An action can be finished. You do it, you tick it, it leaves the board. A thread is not supposed to finish. You add to it over weeks and it holds a question you are still answering.
Those two want opposite handling. An action that sits around turns into guilt, so it should fade. A thread that fades loses the thinking, so it should stay. A single list has to treat one of them wrong.
I should be clear about what fourteen seconds proves. One sentence went in and came back sorted correctly. I have not recorded the sorter being wrong yet, and it will be wrong. I do not have a number for how often.
What the demo did settle was the part I was least sure of. Someone can watch one ordinary sentence land in two places and see why that is better, with no explanation from me.
I did not build a sorter because sorting is interesting.
I built it because I was the sorter, and I kept quitting the job.